User:Aitantv/AvP

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki

Synopsis

An urgent climate emergency speech is delivered by an Alien-Lizard President. This fantasy monologue is intercut with found footage of environmental catastophe, apocalyptia gameplay, and long shots of derelict landscapes and spaces.

Critiques

  • I'm constructing artifice and removing myself from reality, in a safe predictable, 'conceptual', sci-fi space. It's so removed from the real it fails to deal with socio-cultural matter.
  • This project puts me in a strait-jacket, captured by performativity. I'm faking it, in a way that I find uninteresting. It's like a masked cabaret. Life is not a masquerade. There's subterrain beneath the surface of appearances, representations. How to go beyond representation in a visual medium? How to get to actuality?
  • I feel my practice should just be an extension of my life, not an appendage. It should slow naturally from my lived reality instead of being an appendage. Now it is a balloon I constantly have to inflate lest it deflates and becomes a limp sack.
  • This is a chance to play with Arthur Jafa's idea of Affective Proximity, where certain things seek to be next to other things...."It's a kind of ordering or things emerging and demanding to be themselves. It's as if there's a latent potentiality in things."
  • Now apocypltic imaginings are far from fantasy. They are closer and closer to reality itself. We no longer need to imagine. The material and evidence is around us.

Research Questions

research

  • Why do people believe the lizard theory? Why are the same people likely to disbelieve climate change?
  • Why are lizards perceived as evil or conniving?
  • In what ways is capitalism ingesting climate change? How is it morphing to make it a part?
  • Climate change and migration are the two most significant political subjects at present. How do the two themes intersect?
  • Perhaps an Adam Curtis style video essay is the best way to go, but this Lizard Alien is the narrator. In that way we might better identify or empathise with the lizard who points out the mixed messages arising from discussions around climate change.